IBM's new generation supercomputer

IBM is currently developing a new generation supercomputer and will be the world's most powerful supercomputer.

The supercomputer, called Roadrunner, is expected to be located at Los Alamos State New Mexico State Laboratory. With a computational power of about 1 petaflop, equivalent to 1 million billions of calculations per second, this will be the world's top computing speed calculator.

Roadrunner plans to use a combination of 16,000 AMD Opteron processors along with 16000 Cell BE chips and both processors will share Roadrunner's computational work.

The reason for IBM's entry into Roadrunner was that in September, the Energy Commission (DOE) contacted the company, requesting a world-leading supercomputer with a minimum of 1 petaflop. Expected initial cost is USD 110 million within 3 years.

Today's leading server, BlueGene, is also from IBM

The use of a combination of two processors is to reduce the cost of manufacturing. According to IBM, Cell BE processors are responsible for performing major floating point operations, while Opteron processors will handle the transfer and processing of data between nodes.

By the time it was completed, Roadrunner would undoubtedly be the world's leading supercomputer, easily far ahead of the current champion of the IBM BlueGene / L supercomputer. BlueGene / L is currently located in Lawrence Livemore's national laboratory, with the potential to calculate 280 trillion calculations per second, which is more than ¼ of Roadrunner's strength.

Now the Roadrunner problem is just a huge area as well as the energy it requires. According to calculations, Roadrunner will occupy 12000 square feet (approximately 1114 m2) and will be transported gradually to DOE in the third quarter of 2007.

The combined supercomputers are now becoming a trend in leading computer manufacturers. Then the specialized processors will perform the calculation, while the basic processors will perform the remaining work thereby maximizing the performance of the two types of processors as well as minimizing costs. charge.

According to DOE, the Roadrunner supercomputer will be used to study the spectrum, as well as to manage the nuclear weapons that the US is storing because of its great power, Roadrunner can simulate 'longevity'. of nuclear weapons.

In addition, this supercomputer can also serve to set up gene mapping, weather forecast .

Hoang Tung